


under the lost lakes

by fakelight



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Future Fic, Monster Hunters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:20:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24921457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fakelight/pseuds/fakelight
Summary: Five towns.Five calls, almost always in the early hours of the morning.Repeating the town name, to make sure she has it right.Dropping everything.Picking up exactly where they’d left off. Until the town is safe, and they go their separate ways. Until the next time.
Relationships: Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler
Comments: 10
Kudos: 20





	under the lost lakes

She almost doesn’t pick up.

It’s 11, far past the time any decent person would call, outside of an emergency, and it’s the fear of said emergency that has her rushing to answer the phone.

“Hello?” 

There’s no answer at first. Only a breath, but she _knows._

She waits, her fist clenched tight around the cord.

“Ashland, Maine,” Jonathan says, finally.

Nancy feels like she’s been punched in the chest.

“Ashland, Maine,” she repeats.

He hangs up.

Nancy calls work from the airport. (“It’s a family emergency,” she tells them, her head tucked into her shoulder to hide from the shame of the lie. “It’s pretty bad. I’ll keep you posted. I shouldn’t be more than a week.”) 

She’s on a plane by ten.

The sun is beginning to set as she dumps her bags in the trunk of the rental, the duffel making a loud clunk, Nancy wincing as it lands. She yanks the zipper down, but everything is as it was when she hastily packed it. Boots, fingerless gloves, leather jacket. Baseball bat, as of yet, un-nailed. 

She folds the map she was handed along with the car keys into a manageable square, tracing the roads with her finger until she finds it—the closest motel to the town, from the west. Gary’s Motor Inn. 

“He better have already gotten a room,” Nancy mutters to herself, and turns the engine over.

There’s a key waiting under her name.

“Room 6,” the bored desk clerk drawls, and the demeanor is so familiar Nancy fights the urge to ask the same question she’d been asked the first time they did this. (And the second, and the third.)

It ends up being a double.

Jonathan is nowhere to be found, but she can see his things, piled haphazardly on top of the bed closest to the door. She searches for a note, but there’s nothing.

Nancy shakes her head—of course he didn’t leave a note—drops her bags, and heads for the bathroom. She splashes water on her face, drying off with a too-rough towel. Stares at herself in the mirror. 

Bags under her eyes. Hair tangled. 

She breathes out.

Five towns. 

Five calls, almost always in the early hours of the morning.

Repeating the town name, to make sure she has it right.

Dropping everything. 

Picking up exactly where they’d left off. Until the town is safe, and they go their separate ways. Until the next time.

“There won’t be a next time,” she says out loud to the girl in the mirror.

Her reflection doesn’t seem to believe her.

There’s nothing to do but wait, until Nancy knows exactly what they’re facing. She’s absentmindedly flipping through the channels, legs crossed on top of the bedspread, back against the headboard, when she hears the key in the door. Instinct has her hand reaching for the baseball bat on the pillow next to her, but she knows who it is.

She grabs the bat anyway.

Jonathan shoulders the door open, shaking wet hair out of his face—it’s started raining, she notices—and Nancy sees him for the first time in two years.

He hasn’t changed.

Not since she drove away, watching him in the rearview mirror, his hand raised in a goodbye as she dropped him at the bus station on her way to the airport. She can’t even remember the name of the town they’d saved.

Or the time before that, pressing her lips to his forehead as he slept fitfully in the worst of the motel rooms they’d shared over the years, carefully avoiding his bruised ribs, before slipping out the door, a note left on the pillow next to him, four words after two weeks. 

_See you next time_.

“Please don’t tell me that’s the same bat,” is his greeting, unfazed at the sight of her lazily brandishing a weapon at him. 

“I think Steve has the first one,” she replies, not trying to hide the sarcasm.

Jonathan tilts his head in acknowledgment, then frowns a little. “Is that for me or the monster?”

Nancy glances down. Shrugs.

“Depends on if you’re paying for dinner.”

He drives them to a diner two miles away, the windshield wipers and heat on full blast subverting any attempt at a conversation until they arrive.

She scootches into the booth slowly, choosing the side facing the door. Just in case.

Jonathan shakes his head as he slides across the vinyl. “Not that kind of monster.”

“And how was I supposed to know that?” Nancy asks impatiently, giving him a look.

He shrugs quickly, flipping a menu out of the stack leaning against the wall, handing it to her. “This one seems . . . sneaky.”

“Sneaky,” she repeats slowly, trying to figure out what that means.

“Think . . . Mind Flayer, not Demogorgon.”

Nancy almost protests that he’s only confusing her more, but then she casts her mind back, to Will’s possession, to the burning heat of the cabin. She nods, once. “Hiding in plain sight?”

“I think so. It’s not here to wreck the town.” He pauses, and Nancy’s reminded of the way he hesitated on the phone. “But from what I can tell, it’s spreading.” He takes a breath, like he’s about to say something more, then seems to think better of it, his head sinking as he fixes his gaze to the menu.

She watches him out of the corner of her eye as the waitress takes their orders (meatloaf for her, over easy eggs with bacon for him) and as he fiddles with the creamers that litter the table. There’s something he’s not telling her.

They avoid personal questions, almost to a fault—she gets most of her information about him from Mike, who hears it from Will—but this is about this town, she reasons, and takes her own breath.

His gaze flicks up.

Nancy gives him a look, raises her eyebrows. “On the phone. You . . . you almost didn’t say where. You were going to hang up.”

Jonathan smiles, almost ruefully. “You noticed that.”

She raises her eyebrows again. _I notice when you do things. I know you_.

He brings his hand to his mouth, gnawing at a thumbnail, a habit she thought he’d left behind in high school. It must be worse than she thought. 

He breathes in, again. Breathes out. Comes to a decision, places his hands in front of him, and then looks at her, steady. “It started with a girl. Her name was—is—Barbara.”

The waitress chooses that moment to plunk their meals down.

Nancy is frozen. 

Jonathan watches her carefully.

She feels it again, the metaphorical blow to her chest that leaves her reeling, unable to breathe. She mechanically picks up her fork, forcing herself to take a bite of meatloaf, which tastes like ash in her mouth.

He’s still watching her, his eggs cooling on the plate.

Gesturing with her fork, Nancy tries to sound normal around the lump in her throat as she says, “You should probably eat that.”

Either she’s convinced him or he knows that it’s too far past the line into personal to ask any questions, but his eyes only linger for one moment longer before he picks up his own fork. Nancy swallows a sigh. Of relief, or regret, she’s not sure which.

They eat the rest of their meal in relative silence, Nancy uttering her first words in what feels like hours when the waitress tosses the check on their table, insisting that she’ll be the one paying.

“No,” he says with a shake of his head, his wallet already out, pulling the check toward him. “You got the last time.”

“You know that’s not true.” Her eyebrow raises. “And I still might want to hit you with that bat.”

Jonathan frowns before he remembers her words from the hotel, and huffs out a laugh.

The waitress blinks.

Nancy pulls the check from beneath his outstretched hand, ignoring the jolt that runs through her as her fingers brush against his. It’s always like this in the beginning, the heady rush of his presence after so long, the way they fit together just so.

It’s the after, that’s when things get complicated.

It’s in the car, the windshield fogging up as he fumbles with the keys, when she finally says, “I’m ready. Tell me.”

He takes a breath.

They’re not so different, Nancy thinks, her Barb and the girl she’s watching through a window. Barb would sit and diligently do her homework, every night. 

This one is sitting. 

But that’s all she’s doing.

And not just her. The mother, the father, the younger sister, all sitting at the kitchen table, staring straight ahead, mechanically eating their dinner—the same way Nancy had, only an hour ago.

But there’s something missing. There’s nothing behind their eyes.

Nancy suppresses a shiver, and lowers the binoculars.

The house itself is almost painfully normal. An American flag hanging limp on a pole jutting out from the porch. A bike lying on its side in the driveway, between two nondescript cars. Firewood stacked against the side of the house.

But the people inside are monsters. Literally.

Jonathan’s voice comes as a surprise. “It’s weird, right?” 

Nancy nods, her eyes still fixed on the house and its occupants. They’ve gotten into sync, lifting their forks in unison. It’s even eerier than before.

“You okay?”

She really isn’t, but they’ve done this too many times. The answer is always the same.

“Of course,” she lies. “Yes. I’m fine.” 

She can’t see it in the darkness, but she doesn’t need to see him to know the look that he has on his face. His _I don’t believe you but I’m not going to push you_ face. The face she’s seen far too often.

The face that is part of the reason they only speak when they’re fighting monsters.

Nancy shakes her head, shaking off the familiar irritation. It hasn’t even been a day. “I’m fine,” she repeats, and hates that she doesn’t even believe herself. She swallows, and tries again. “So what’s the plan?” Thinks back to Hawkins, to the cabin. “Heat?”

She hears rather than sees him shrug from where he’s perched behind her in the tree, his jacket rubbing up against the bark. 

“I mean, Maine makes sense, if it likes the cold,” she continues, thinking out loud. “So maybe it’s . . . the same?”

“They’re all _the same_.”

The same monster they’ve been fighting throughout the years, every time it crops up, different aspects of one beast that just won’t die. Demogorgons in Minnesota, in Arizona, dogs in Oregon, a (thankfully smaller than the last one) flesh-monster that (still) threw Jonathan through a plate glass window on a fork tine of Long Island, the last time.

“The same as the last time we had to deal with it possessing someone, I mean.” There’s an edge of sarcasm to her voice that she regrets almost immediately–the last time someone was possessed, it was Will. Nancy swivels her head, seeing the glint in his eyes as he studiously avoids her gaze. 

“Are _you_ okay?” she asks, knowing that the question is coming far too late, and that just like him, she won’t push any further if he lies to her too.

“Yes.”

She can’t help the laugh that ghosts across her lips. They really are perfect for each other. Shared trauma, till the end.

He shakes his head, and slides out of the tree. Extends his hand up to her.

“C’mon,” he says, the glint gone. “Just because it likes the cold doesn’t mean we have to.”

She braces herself, preparing for the landing, then hesitates. She takes a breath. “It’s going to work, right? We can save them.” 

“It’s going to work,” he reassures her, although she knows it’s as much for his own sake as it is for hers.

Nancy takes one last look over her shoulder, at Barbara, and her family, and the monster that dwells within. 

For now.

She takes his hand, and jumps.

It’s still raining as they pull up to the motel, and Nancy dashes from the car to the door, jamming the key in the lock as Jonathan follows her at a more measured pace, not seeming to care about the wet.

She kicks the heater as she deposits her damp coat on the back of a chair. She turns as it whirs to life, stepping to the side as Jonathan closes the door softly behind him. He doesn’t bother to take his coat off as he flops onto the bed, digging through his bag, coming up with a notebook that Nancy barely recognizes, considering it used to be hers.

“I can’t believe you still have that,” she remarks offhand, perching on the arm of the chair. Formerly a World History notebook, it has all their research, all the things they’ve learned as they’ve fought through the years. 

“Had it last time, didn’t I?”

Nancy rolls her eyes at him, even though his focus is on the notebook, not her. “I don’t know why you have to look it up, we know what to do. Plus, it’s not like we were taking notes back then.”

“I wrote it down,” he says absentmindedly as he flips through the pages. “Just in case.”

“Did you think we’d forget?”

She never could. Even if she’d tried.

“No.” He lifts his eyes to hers. “Never.”

Nancy nods, once. She crosses her arms, watches as he folds a corner of a page over, his face thoughtful, serious, absorbed. “Here.” She reaches for the sleeve of his jacket. “You’ll get the bed wet.”

Jonathan allows her to pull the coat off, shifting around so she can reach the other arm, his focus still on the notebook. Once he’s free, he shifts to a seated position, pulling a pen from the spiral and jotting down a note in a margin. He’d always been the planner, the foil to her rashness. Stopping her from charging in guns (literally, once) blazing. 

It’s just that all of his carefully laid plans tend to fall apart, when confronted with monsters.

She lays the coat across the vacated chair arm, then flops onto her own bed, staring at the ceiling, enjoying the thrum of the rain outside punctuated with the occasional sound of pen scratching.

“I wonder what she’s like,” she muses aloud. “Barbara.”

The scratching stops.

Nancy rolls onto her side, propping her head up on an outstretched elbow. Jonathan is watching her, as closely as he had in the diner.

There’s a long, charged moment.

“I think,” Jonathan says, carefully, deliberately, “she’s a normal teenage girl. Who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He looks like he wants to say more. 

He doesn’t.

Nancy blinks. Nods once, slowly, to herself.

Then stands. 

“I’m going to take a shower,” she announces, and flees into the bathroom without looking back.

Only with the door locked and the plausible excuse of the rivulets of water running over her face, does Nancy allow the tears to fall.

She can’t even begin to count the number of times she’s cried in the shower with Jonathan only a wall away, ever since the night that started it all. The tree, the Upside Down. _Follow my voice_. Nancy lets out a choked sob of a laugh at how little they knew. How little they still know, even after everything they’ve done.

She cries for the girl she was, and for Barb, still, and for this girl now, hopefully still holding on. All the girls in the wrong places, at the wrong times.

She remembers Will, and the blackness erupting out of him, and how they’d saved him.

How they’d saved so many people, over the years.

How every time she comes out of the shower, Jonathan has looked up at her and asked, “Better?”

She always nods, even when it isn’t.

When it’s over, the water is cold, but she feels clearer—sharper. 

Ready.

**Author's Note:**

> This could extremely loosely be called a _Run_ AU, and by extremely loosely, I just mean the concept of the phone call because oof did that show go off the rails.


End file.
